Creativity, Innovation and the Pursuit of Efficiency

Over the years of interviewing farmers for AGCO FarmLife, and prepping those farmers for Fendt Films productions, I’ve never had a farmer stop the interview and worry about whether or not it would be interesting. I’ve never had a farmer say an interview is boring.

Steve and Chad Nuest of Nuest Partnership, in Hancock, Minnesota, broke the trend. And it turns out they make a business of breaking trends.

While asking about their background, farm size, what they grow, the equipment they run—the standard stuff—Chad stopped me.

CHAD: So, before we get into a lot of this, are we on interview right now? All of the stuff that we’re talking about seems very underwhelming to me.

And that’s when I knew. It wasn’t just time to turn the interview toward the Nuests’ unique approach to farming—to their creativity and innovation, where it leads them, and why they search for a different way. I also needed to turn it over completely to them, in their own words.

Their words help express how they changed their approach to farming. How Steve’s years as an ag banker helped shape an approach to risk management and making the most of less acres. How efficiency means something a little different to Chad, because of how he values his time. How farming fits into life, and not the other way around. And how a change in their fleet helps them accomplish it.

CHAD: And this is what we’re telling you, the stuff that keeps us interested, is what gives us the most headaches because there’s no one doing it. So, there’s a whole learning curve there.

Here, in their own words, is what they’ve learned, and how Fendt helps them farm the way they want.

STEVE: I farmed for the first 10 years with my father-in-law, and he had a lot of livestock I didn’t really enjoy. And then the 80s came along and we had the farm crisis. I had bought this leading-edge computer and taught myself spreadsheets. We didn’t farm enough to support myself and my wife with the way the commodity prices had dropped.

I had an opportunity to work in banking. since I was pretty good with numbers, where I could help farmers do cash flows and break evens and things like that. I went down and talked to Moore State Bank; they really need somebody to package farmer’s home loan guaranties for them. It would help the bank to give better security on their loans. And it also helped save farmers. And I said, I’ve never done that before, but let’s try. And they gave me six of ’em to do and three of ’em got approved. The first three approvals they ever had, they offered me a job.

After several years in the business, Steve went back to farming.

STEVE: Probably the biggest impact is it’s taught me how to try to minimize financial risk that may come as a detriment to really making a lot of money. So, when we try to market more systematically and forward price, and so a lot of times miss the super highs, but we also miss the valleys. So, it’s just helped in that way. And it’s also just… I’m a number cruncher. It helps me try to figure out what things are costing us, and if we can afford them the right way, to structure things to benefit our farm.

Chad went to school, earned a master’s degree, and taught school early in his adult life. It helped shape his approach to farming when he came back some 17 years ago.

CHAD: My wife said she would never marry a farmer.

STEVE: So did mine. (laughs)

CHAD: And so, we kind of took our time moving back. I wanted to let her experience the city life a little bit, and she was ready to move out here.

Things were pretty conventional when Steve and Chad first started farming together.

CHAD: We were corn on corn for 10,15 years. There were some struggles with that. We had raised some soybeans in between there when we didn’t get our corn crop in. And a few of those years we had some diseases that came in. I kind of followed dad on that… He was frustrated with soybeans and said he would never plant those again. So, we were looking at something else.

We had a young gentleman working for us. He was an agronomist and he had been pushing kidney beans and finally me and him together were loud enough voice that dad decided let’s go for it. We started doing some kidney beans and that was a good experience for us, and we’ve enjoyed doing that. It’s given us some diversity. And this year we’ll be starting to do some carrots.

Part of the reason for some of this, too, is farmers in the area have put processing plants in and made this stuff a little bit more feasible than it would’ve been years ago.

STEVE: I’ve kind of got an ego, and I want to keep with the Joneses, so to speak. My vision was always to have a huge farm… 10,000 acres, 15,000 acres… And Chad says to me, dad, does this make any sense that we’re farming all these acres? And I’m kind of a number cruncher and on paper it really made sense, but in reality, it didn’t.

We like to have family time on the weekends, we like to go to the cabin. I like to spend some time in Florida. I am going to let Chad talk about this more, but family’s important to us in our free time. We see a lot of our peers work six days a week, lots of hours, and that’s just not us. We might come off as slothful, but it doesn’t fit our style.

CHAD: I remember thinking, I just married a beautiful woman. I want to start a family. He was talking about needing to move 30 miles away, we got to run 60 more irrigator pivots… And I was like, this sounds terrible. You know what I mean? I was at that stage, and he listened to me, and I think that was what was important, because he knows that I’m eventually the one that’s going to be running this. And if that’s not what you want to do, then what are we doing this for?

I’m coaching the girls’ basketball team in town. I enjoy doing that. I love working with the kids. And coaching is one of the ways that I can get to know the youth and have an impact in their lives. Those things are important to us. And to be able to do some of that stuff, we have to have some free time. And that’s where we are at right now.

STEVE: So, we’re going to try to focus on farming our best, and doing a good job at that. And to increase the revenue, we’re going to go into more of the specialty crops.

CHAD: But that’s the kind of the mindset we have. We like to do things differently. And we’re learning that Fendt tractors and equipment are made to … give us the possibility to do it differently than the way we were doing it with the equipment that we were running before.

The Nuests were especially taken with the reverse station option.

CHAD: In our kidney beans right now, we pull everything behind us and a lot of it’s very tedious work. And we want to try to find a way that makes that more efficient. And one of the ideas that has come forward through our conversations with Fendt and some of their employees … is they make a reverse station tractor. And we would train some of our equipment to push it rather than pull it. So you can see everything down in front of you like you would out of a combine, and you’re not leaning over your shoulder, looking behind you. And I think with the help of the people that we’ve met, this stuff is possible.

When Chad mentions the “people we’ve met,” he means Fendt employees at all levels. Through a salesman at Zeigler Ag, who now works with Fendt at the corporate level, the Nuests met a German couple—Robin Jungling and Isabella Platt—who wound up working for three seasons on their farm and taught them the benefits of the Fendt brand.

CHAD: They helped us all the way through kidney bean harvest three years in a row. That relationship has led to so many ideas that have been shared. So much knowledge. Robin has helped manufacture different pieces here. Isabelle is an electrical engineer at Fendt. She works with the steering components. We call her numerous times to ask questions about some of the Fendt technology, and it’s just been such a fruitful relationship with them.

Meanwhile, Steve was learning about Fendt from neighbors as well.

STEVE: So last year a neighbor bought a 1162 Fendt tracked tractor, and he told my friend that it was only running him 18 gallons to the acre. I mean, our Versatile four tracks were running about 26 to 28 gallons an hour doing the same thing. And my friend bleeds green and he was pretty impressed.

You just run the numbers. If we can save on average seven gallons an hour over our whole fleet, it’ll save us $33,000 a year at $2.75 cent fuel. That’s a significant savings.

So we bought a 9T combine, a 1050 tractor, and I just bought a used 1046, and we’re buying two 930s. Both of them will be reverse station.

The Gold Star warranty Fendt offers is huge and it’s fantastic. Just in oil changes and filters alone, it should save me about $2,500 a year per tractor. That’s a huge savings, tractor and combine. So if I have six units on my farm, that’s 15 grand. That’s a big savings and that’s a fixed cost.

CHAD: For us, what we’re hoping to get out of Fendt is it is a very efficient tractor. I’m trying to figure out a way to be more efficient myself with an efficient tractor and the processes of that work. I want to give my time to doing some of my extracurricular things.

STEVE: I think Fendt helps us be more creative in our farming. We’ve met a lot of people in Fendt. We feel that no other brand is going to give us that voice and nobody ever has before.

CHAD: And I’ve had that experience all the way along the line. When I think about growing bold together with Fendt, that’s kind of what I mean. They’re taking a chance on me and I’m taking a chance on them. But together we’re going to make this relationship work.

STEVE: I think one of the things that makes me a Fendt farmer is I’m not afraid to change. I’m not afraid to change brands. I don’t really care what the neighbors think. I’m trying to do what’s right for my farm.

CHAD: But sometimes it might be a creative way to do it a little bit different. That’s how I feel right now. That’s how I feel with Fendt. That’s how it’s felt this whole way.